hope was here.

Ball & Chain Record Store

Someone came into the ball and chain
record store I work at
and said no bags
a waste of plastic.

I said yes.
You must be a granola-eating, left-wing,
dig-gothic, post-modernist, watch a lot
of Billy Jack movies, Arlo Guthrie type.

He said yes.
I smiled.
I dream of Tom Waits fingerpainting
lightbulbs on my holiday wreath
and I'm Jewish, pretty weird huh?
I celebrate Tiny Tim's birthday
with a parade of dancing deadheads
some who never sleep and some
who never go to the bathroom.

His T-shirt said have you hugged
a rainforest today?

I said I love the planet
but it's unrequited love.

He told me babe, you're bringing me down.
When I was born my first word was ohmmmm...

In kindergarten I organized the pacifists
to demand we didn't have to read
from Dick, Jane, and Spot books.
Too generic.
I demanded we get American Indians
to talk about what's real.
And I gave them my nap mat
cause it's their land and
I gave them my peanut butter
and jelly sandwich cause
the buffalo have been murdered
and they need protein.

He blushed with passion and said
tell me you.

Well, the first 15 years of my life
I thought Barry Manilow was a sex symbol.
Needless to say I got a sort of late start
at being at one with the cosmic heartbeat.

He gave me one of those looks
like I better get this girl
some Jack Kerouac books to read fast
before she suffers the confusion
of not knowing there's other existences
beside the banal.

I put my hands on my hips and squealed
I read On the Road
and the letters of Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady
and vice versa.

He said on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday
I'm a part time Marxist.

He took out a beanie
put it on his head
and began to chant.
This definitely turned me on.
All of a sudden he began to sing
the minimum wage workers' song
"the walls are full of faces
the mini-malls are full of neon
the bitter bite the hands that feed them
the food is a mixture of bone, blood
and snails
man is a cannibal."

I said wow! you are the sort of guy
who says right on and really means it.
You probably only drink the milk
of socially conscious cows
who voted Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
for president.

He screamed, oh chick, my life changed
in 1962 when I realized the Constitution
was written without women, blacks, indians,
and poor white men in mind,
That was not o.k.

I became the Jackson Pollack of feminism.
I threw paint of outrage everywhere.
I was a man who identified
with Billie Holiday and Ernest Hemingway.
I was a traveler.

So what brings you into this
San Fernando Valley air conditioned
intellectually malnourished record store
with the exactlys?
We open exactly at 10:00
Close exactly at 10:00
No matter what our karma
Damn it's so crass,
you can't even rent The Last Waltz here.

He said I'm in a competitive mantra makers
bowling league.
We have weavers, chess players,
avant-garde stamp collectors
and Hell's Angels
inventors all.
We bowl whenever the fuck
the spirit moves us.
With any luck we'll be playing the
New Age/lawyers/used car salesman league
again real soon.

Hippies and New Age people are like
the difference between Bob Dylan and Bob Hope.

He smiled and said do you want to bowl?
We are definitely into strikes
for the betterment of the worker.
We need someone who looks
like she could walk into the woods
and find incense without getting poison ivy.
You look like Van Morrison
when you pout your lips.
You could be a part of the father, son, and
the holy ghost meshuganeh athletic league.
Besides I love you.

I started to weep.
Tears of Bas Mitzvah cake
and tears of being the last kid picked
for field hockey in gym class.
Authentic tears.
Nobody ever said all that to me before.
I guess I kind of do have Van Morrison's mouth.
Why hadn't anybody ever noticed?

I said I love you.
But every free moment I moonlight at
Hairy Krishna Organic Coiffures
and Tea Salon.
We use
no chemicals
no dye
no sprays
no combs
no brushes
Hell, you look pretty much the same going out
as going in.

He said what's a nice girl like you doing
living in a Republican administration like this?

The manager of the record store comes over and says
You know the movie Farenheit 451?
Corporate has ordered us to burn it.
Get to it!
Don't give me your damn whimpering
Joan of Arc eyes.
Lots of people would love to have your job.
I screamed pig! PIG!
You are giving barnyard animals a bad name.
Cops are Pigs!
Intolerants are Pigs!
Bigots are Pigs!
Everybody who does it and says
they're just doing their job is a Pig!
Everybody who does it to somebody else
knows what they are.

This is my first day at the record store.
I guess if they want to have a quiet
complacent yes sir type of employee
they ought to ask different questions
on the application.

Like do you conform?
Like do you care that this is stolen land?
Like do you believe in playlists?
Like do you believe in yourself?
Do you mind waking up alone
rather than being beat up with fists?
Do you see the government is beating us up
as bad as a knife in our elbows
as bad as a slur in our ears
as bad as a rape
when we just wanted to be held

And all they ask is
can you work part-time?
and what days can't you work?
and they say whom do we contact
in an emergency?
I said
cause you need to ask that
constitutes an emergency.

The hippie said my name is Hell's Bells
but you can call me hope.
He said I dug you.
Now I dig your whole being.
It's strange,
No matter how many nights I wake up unhappy
there is still a possibility of rising
into a change so easily.
The outlaw lives in a world where
when he sees a mirror he sees a hero.
And all heroes put their bellbottoms on
one leg at a time.

Let's face it,
How can you trust money when
there are politicians' faces printed on it.
Money is sexist.
The only woman on so-called American currency
which is really Turtle Island to the Indians
is Susan B. Anthony and they stopped making those
real fast.

Is money worth killing for?
Is money worth killing for?

I ran through the store singing
about William Blake's eyebrows
and Walt Whitman's bellybutton
saying everything is alive
and everything is sort of adorable.
I took paperclips and gave them
to loving vegetarian families
who needed someone.

I took the bathroom sink and gave it a hug.
I freed all the rubberbands!
And I said to all the plastic bags
I will never burden you
with films weighing you down,
Perry Como cassettes,
or even a piece of Jerry Garcia's beard.
Well maybe.

But I will never staple a bag
for you brought love.

Most people tell me
it was all the pop tarts I ate.
Some people tell me
it was because I was a liar.
And I said I'm too honest
to be anybody's best friend
But at times nobody believes
this hippie ever even came by.

There are
no lingering peace signs
no incense
no tea bags
no fuck the fuckers pamphlets
Yet I still can't even believe
Abbie Hoffman is dead.
So my strengths and pains
are in my sense of wonder.
All I know is I don't believe in
wearing sandals and argyle socks together.
And when I needed it most, hope was here.
Change must not be too far behind.



-Ellyn Maybe

On the lexicon of lunch

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."

-Mark Strand

Mmmmm, this especially applies to the wondrous grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich I had for lunch. Have I ever told you cheese is poetry?

This is what I want.

"Going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry.”

Use the term "office" liberally, of course, with which I think Virginia Woolf would agree.

absence

Let's talk about knowing too much.

"I could not speak, and my eyes failed,
I was neither living nor dead,
and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light,
the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer."

-TS

"I didn't know anything anymore,
I didn't care,
and it didn't matter,
and suddenly I felt really free."

-JK

I scrawled the second quote all over New Zealand public restrooms in 2004. It was my dissent. Towards/against what? (Does the preposition really matter as long as it still conveys the meaning of force? Being pushed and being pulled still suck.)

I'm waiting for an epiphany.

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

Communion

In the subway I had the impulse to kill
and sat and stared straight ahead
to avoid the eyes of strangers
who might read my dread
and when finally I had the courage
to shift my gaze from the poster above
I saw to my dismay the eyes of others
turning away.

David Ignatow

-----
I came across this poem last night in a fit of word-hunger. It reminds me of some of my favorite lines from a book I can never remember: "I feel like such a fake. I've been spending all of this time putting my life back together, and no one has even noticed."

I've been thinking lately about cycles of self-doubt and the renewal of confidence that eventually comes. Even those of us at our most depressed can, hopefully, attest to bright spots among the shadowy spaces of existence. For myself, I seem to live my life in spurts of pause and action, pause and action. I'm mostly tired all of the time when I am alone. But with others added to the mix, SPRING!, JUMP!, CLANG!, BASH! (insert cool Batman action words here), I come alive and many have commented on the unprecedented level of energy I can carry. This is one of my constant conundrums--how can I take this energy that I so create in frenzies of sociality and apply it to myself? I'd like to bottle it up, put it in a boiler, melt the result, and put it in a liqui-gel capsule.

I don't know if I have a point (one of my many deficiencies, yes, I know), but I do know that this morning waking up before 7am to go to a class across town made me feel like my life is finally coming together. For really no reason at all. I took a class last semester on my lunch break. So what if this time around the class is in the morning before work? For some reason this makes me feel together, and at this intersection, that is enough. I feel like the poem: by the time I have composed myself, no one is watching anymore. Why can't others watch us in our times of composure? Why is anxiety attractive?

It doesn't really matter, because by the time I had bought my textbook after class my life was in shambles again.

emblazoned zones and fiery poles

I've been listening to the most recent Bouncing Souls' album far too much recently. It takes me back, back, back, to New Jersey sidewalks and fire drills during ceramics' class. One of the consistent themes is something that I, as an extremely solitary person, mull over quite a bit. Can the city comfort? I've lived in my city now for about six years, and I cannot pinpoint if the comfort comes from the city itself or from seeing someone I know or recognize every single day of my life. I think if anything the comfort of the city, any city, comes from the ability to nod to these individuals and not have to go through the formal facades of greeting. That is one of my favorite things about the downtown area here. I like anonymity. I like pausing randomly to appreciate the lines of buildings and streets intersecting at odd angles. I like zigzagging through sidestreets and back alleys.

A professor once told me that I reminded him of Wallace Stevens. I took this in two separate ways, depending on my mood that day: in one way, what a compliment! I love Wallace Stevens' poetry--in fact, I take lines from one of his poems as part of my personal creed: "Then we, as we beheld her striding there alone, knew that there never was a world for her except the one she sang, and singing, made." His poetry can bring tears to my eyes, there is such sadness and solitude and so much truth of the deficiences I see in myself.

But in the other way, that way where you want others to see yourself as you hope to see yourself, I felt like I had obviously not communicated myself eloquently enough. How could this professor that I respect and admire so much see me as similar to this old man who worked in corporate jobs in office buildings his entire life? The sheer genius and beauty of his words was hidden well beneath the fuddy-duddiness of suits and trenchcoats and attaché cases and concrete walls and grey, grey, grey, grey existence. In college I yearned for a pedestal. I would scowl in the corner, put my hood over my head, and scribble ferociously in notebooks. I would even stick out my tongue when I heard any comment void of kinship to my agenda. Would Wallace Stevens ever be so bold as to stick out his tongue on the 52nd floor in a meeting with the board?

I'd like to connect this with the city. Wallace Stevens was of the city. But he was not of the city in a way that I find comforting, cozy, protective, harsh in loving, but "so full of pain that it makes a kind of singing" (to quote Robert Hass). I want the cities I live in to sing with me. I want the steam rising from sewers to envelope me in all of its putrid, warming glory. But I am of Wallace Stevens. I am of his words, his isolationism, his mundaneness, his suits, his grey grey grey existence. I want the city to rip me from these clutches. Can comfort co-exist with the everyday?

"We are not alone in this city that is our home."

January things.

January comes each year and makes me semi-bored. How can January feel like a new year when you have a year-round occupation? My class does not start for another two weeks, and so I am currently searching for purpose. I don't do well with spare time; I never have. Spare time is when I get my most introspective and dark, and/or when I get my most drunk.

Some solutions I have come up with:
1. Go to NY this weekend to visit grandparents and all of those people I've been meaning to see but haven't in a very long time.
2. Search PVCC for night classes in which I can channel this energy. There is so much energy that it becomes negative in the overload, and maybe if I take a drawing or painting or ceramics class I can transfer the energy to masterpieces that will surely arise within a few class meetings.
3. Visit the Daedalus free-book table daily; preferably as early as possible so as to snag all the good free books. Hey, it says, "With compliments," does it not?
4. Join a gym, so as to at least build some muscle (I currently have zilcho) and recondition my poor lungs that have suffered so much at the hands of smoky bars, before I inevitably get lazy and stop going because I get too busy with work and school. (This is another reason why choice #1 looks good--you can't smoke in NYC bars!!)
5. Cover the slanting ceilings of my room with paper and create a charcoal masterpiece. This idea has been floating around in my head for a while now; previously I was afraid of the charcoal dust falling on my head while I sleep, or even worse, the entire masterpiece falling on my head while I sleep.
6. Look to February, which proves to be a most exciting and jam-packed month. This is the least desirable option. Looking forward to things all the time only means you are unhappy in your present. Actually, I should check out flights to St. Croix and ask the boss if I can spirit away for a long weekend somehow pre-week-long-conference in another city.
7. I really need to go back to school full-time. If all one wants to do is read and drink coffee and feel cozy in woolen ponchos, I believe these are clear signs that one is meant to be a perpetual student. What does the debt matter if all it does is pile up? Then I'll never have to pay it back!

Since 7 is a number that frequently identifies me in my life, I shall stop there. Also because the sole New Year's resolution is to stop being a dead-beat and get work done at work and not during non-working hours, as I was wont to do in 2006.